


Monsters

by missazrael



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Blood, Chapter 82 spoilers, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Gore, Hurt No Comfort, PTSD, Spoilers, soul searching and finding no answers, this is sad and I feel sad after writing it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:54:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7145474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missazrael/pseuds/missazrael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>If she keeps herself busy, she doesn't have time to cry.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mikasa and Jean have a conversation in the aftermath of the events in Chapter 82.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Warning, chapter 82 spoilers! Major ones! If you don't want to be spoiled, stop reading here, go read the chapter, then come back and read this.

The sun had gone behind the wall by the time it was all over.

Mikasa prowls the streets, setting up a perimeter against an enemy that won’t be stopped by their weak attempts at protection. If the other shifter comes back, the enormous, animalistic one that called dozens of titans to its bidding, they’re all doomed, and her feeble perimeter, patrolled by an army of one, won’t be enough to hold it back. It’s meaningless, and she knows it, but there’s comfort in it too, in doing what she’s been trained to do and letting her mind go blank, letting her aching, exhausted body occupy all her attention so she doesn’t have to pay attention to the gaping hole in her chest.

If she keeps herself busy, she doesn’t have time to cry.

Armin is gone. She had been too distracted, too busy blasting the traitor out of the back of his cowardly, armored titan, to see him fall, and that haunts her. _What if_ , she asks herself, before she can find another physical task to do, another piece of gear to clean, another blade to sharpen. _What if I’d noticed? What if I’d been able to catch him? What if I’d seen what he was doing, and turned the Thunder Spear on the Colossal? What if, what if, what if…_

There are no what ifs. There are only the facts, she reminds herself, brutally tearing herself from a daydream where she catches him, where she intercepts his plunge from above the walls, plucking him out of the sky so that his body doesn’t shatter on the rooftops of Shingashina, breaking apart like a charred stick from a fire, spreading out across reddened tiles that would absorb his blood if it hadn’t all been evaporated away. There are only the facts, and they are simple: Armin is dead; he died so that Eren could take down the Colossal; the Survey Corps is gone, destroyed by the animal titan on the other side of the wall; and they are now eight, alone and lost, deep in enemy territory. Ten, if you count the traitors, which she doesn’t, or nine, once one of the traitors meets his end and the titan tied beyond the wall comes back into himself.

She shouldn’t be angry with Captain Levi; she can acknowledge that, in a similar situation, she would have given the serum to Eren without a second thought to whoever else was out there. She also knows, deep down, that the serum wouldn’t have mattered, wouldn’t have helped: whatever life still beat in Armin’s chest when he fell from the steam was snuffed out by his collision with the rooftop, snapped clean like his spine, like his ribs, like the back of his skull. But she is angry, fiercely, incandescently so, and when the Captain had come staggering back into the city, covered in blood and dragging a terrified, wild-eyed recruit with him (Mikasa knows she should remember the recruit’s name, but she can’t, the information meaningless in the face of her deep, soul-warping grief), she had barely been able to look at him.

“Where are they?” he’d snarled, shoving the recruit aside and stalking forward, his hands opening and closing into fists, the tendons in his forearms standing out in vivid relief. “Tell me you took at least _one_ of those shit-heaps alive!”

Hange had gone to him, her gate awkward and rolling, her hip injured in the explosion. “Is he…?” she’d asked, and Levi had nodded, tight and curt.

“He’s tied out behind the wall.”

Hange had breathed out, a sigh that had almost been a sob, and lurched forward. Before the Captain had been able to escape, she’d caught him in a hug, a hug that he had actually returned, and for a moment, it looked like the only thing holding them up had been the other’s strength, like they would have both fallen if either of them had let go.

The Captain pushed away first, and Mikasa had swallowed down the bile rising in the back of her throat. What she wouldn’t give for that kind of privilege, to be able to wrap her arms around Armin and feel his heart beating against her, to feel Eren’s arms around them both, the three of them surviving yet again. The Captain and Hange have their commander, tied out beyond the wall and waiting for a snack that will return him to himself; she and Eren have a smoldering pile of parts, barely human anymore, under a tattered blanket.

“Where are they?” the Captain had repeated, his eyes gone flinty and dead, as blank and grey as the eyes of a fish pulled from under the water and left to die, gasping on the ground. 

Hange had nodded, a muscle in her jaw pulling tight, and she and the Captain had gone off together, to the house they’d broken into, to the house where the traitors waited, speared through with as many blades and splinters of wood as they’d been able to find, their limbs cut off and their guts hanging around their feet so that it would take a long, long time for them to heal. 

The traitors had held out longer than Mikasa thought they would have, and she can admit some grudging respect for that, at least. They didn’t start screaming for forty-five minutes.

And now the sun dips behind the walls, casting shadows that Mikasa remembers, long and dark through her hometown, and the traitors are still screaming.

Connie and Sasha sleep in another house, bandaged with whatever scraps of fabric they could find. Sasha had woken up, briefly, and tried to sit up in a panic, jarring the jagged wound on her shoulder and starting it bleeding again. Connie had been there, had held her down, had kept her from hurting herself, even though the effort had made him cough up more blood, and once she was calm again, they’d curled around each other like kittens and fallen into the sleep of utter exhaustion. Mikasa passes the house on her patrols, and nods at the recruit who stands in the door, who she’d bullied into guarding her friends. The recruit nods back, eyes still wide and terrified, and Mikasa wonders if that one will survive.

She finds that she doesn’t care.

A fire flickers in the darkness, further down the street, and she moves towards it, a half-formed idea about an inferno gnawing at the back of her mind. As she gets closer, she sees that it’s a controlled blaze, a campfire carefully ringed by stones, and that it’s tended by a hunched figure. The figure looks up as she gets closer, and Jean’s features are stark and exaggerated by the dim, uncertain light, his bones looking like they’re about to slice out from under his skin.

“Hey,” he says in greeting, his voice raspy with exertion, with exhaustion, and he pokes at the fire with a stick. Mikasa hovers for a moment, uncertain, before sitting down next to him, her leg muscles sighing with relief as she takes her weight off them and settles onto the rock he’s been using as a bench.

“Hi.”

They don’t speak for awhile, just watching the fire flicker and wane as Jean stirs it with his stick, the embers glowing brightly beneath the flames. Wordlessly, he makes two cups of coffee and sets them at the edge of the fire to warm up, and Mikasa realizes, for the first time, that she’s hungry, that her stomach feels pinched and tight. Almost as soon as she thinks about it, it growls, and Jean digs in his pocket and hands her a strip of jerky. She tries to turn it down, shakes her head and holds her hands flat in front of her, but Jean drops it in her lap.

“Take it,” he says, and it’s the quiet insistence in his voice that gets her to pick it up and gnaw on it, the taste of meat making her mouth flood with saliva. “You’re still the strongest we’ve got, you need to keep up your strength.”

“Thank you,” she says as she swallows the last of it, and it’s only when it hits her stomach that she realizes it had looked like Armin, that he had been burned into a piece of jerky before he’d broken apart, and she bends low over her knees and gags, her stomach clinging to the nutrients but her mind rejecting it, her mind wanting it _out_. 

Jean sits quietly beside her, waiting for the fit to pass, and when she stops gagging, when she’s leaning over her knees and sucking air, spitting and and swallowing back all the bile in the back of her throat, he reaches out and touches her back, rubbing lightly in small circles. “I know,” he says, soft and full of a sadness beyond his years, “I thought the same thing. But you need to eat.”

“I’m okay.” She sits up, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, and Jean’s hand falls away. It’s the first time he’s touched her.

“Okay.” He turns back to the fire, and picks up the cups, offering her one of them. She takes it and sips coffee hot enough to scald the inside of her mouth, but she drinks it anyway, anything to wash away the taste of the jerky, to drown out the thoughts of charred, rubbery meat.

As she drinks, a particularly loud, piercing scream rips through the air, and Jean flinches, drawing his cloak closer around himself.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asks him, ignoring how the end of the scream tapers into a name, how it becomes a garbled word, spoken through broken teeth and a torn tongue.

“Why aren’t you?” he counters, and she shrugs. He accepts that answer, and reaches up to rub at his shoulder, the bandage covering it gleaming white in the firelight. She remembers the piece of jagged wood he’d had caught there, and how he’d ground his teeth together as Hange had pulled it free.

“I’m fine,” he says, answering a question she hadn’t—a question she wouldn’t have—asked. She watches as a faint, wintery smile moves the corner of his mouth, the firelight painting ghastly orange shadows across his cheekbones. “Better than _they_ are, anyway.”

He jerks his head in the direction of the house with the traitors, where Hange and the Captain and Eren are working, where the scream that had been a name turns wet and choking before fading away.

“Good,” Mikasa snaps, and the anger is back, the anger that keeps the grief at bay flaring up again, burning brighter than the white flash that had been the Colossal titan. “Good, they deserve it. They deserve _everything_.”

Jean shrugs again, and she wants to shake him. “What?” she asks, more an accusation than a question. 

She doesn’t expect him to answer, expects him to back down in the face of her righteous fury, but Jean has always surprised her. First he surprised her with his awkwardness, his fumbling foolishness beneath the mask of cool he tried so hard to cultivate; then he surprised her with how he grew up, how Trost sculpted him, molded him, and forged him into steel; and now he surprises her yet again by answering, by not being afraid of her.

“I’ve been thinking.” He rubs his shoulder again and winces; when he pulls his hand away, it’s splotched with his blood. He wipes the blood on the edges of his cloak, where it joins the faded stains already there, and she wonders how many of those stains are from him and how many are from soldiers now dead and lost.

She waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t, and she finally forces herself to ask, to prod him into continuing. “About what?”

“About when the wall fell.” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, the flames reflecting in the center of his pupil. “You were there, right? This city is your old home.”

“Yes.” She draws her arms around her knees, lifts her scarf up to the bridge of her nose, hating herself for needing its comfort but not denying it to herself. “I lost everything that day.”

“No, you didn’t.” That wintery smile again, a slight correction. “You still have Eren. And you have… had…” He trails off, and she’s glad of it. Her scarf doesn’t smell like Eren anymore, hasn’t for years, but when she inhales and it pulls tight under her nose, she imagines she can catch the ghost of him, still woven into the fibers.

Jean shakes himself a little, swallows and clears his throat before continuing. “I remember it. I didn’t really know what was happening, only that my mom and dad were so afraid.” He glances at her again, and then back into the fire. “It must have been worse for you.”

“It was.” _Worse_ is an understatement; when Mikasa closes her eyes, she can still feel Mr. Hannes picking her up, can still smell his sweat and the alcohol leaking from his pores, can still hear the sound of Carla Jaeger’s bones being rent apart by the titan. Sometimes, she doesn’t know whether it’s better or worse to not have a visual to go with that sound, but she’s never been able to ask Eren. It’s something they don’t talk about, something they can’t talk about. She thinks that the smoldering wreck under the blanket will be another.

“I know it was.” Jean winces as they hear another scream, high and warbling, from the house. They wait in silence after the scream dies away, and when another doesn’t come, Mikasa is glad. It’s easier to ignore sobbing than screams. “What I keep thinking about, though,” Jean says, speaking louder, like he could cover the crying sounds with his voice, “is how old we were.” Another glance, and she realizes that his eyes are glittering with fever. “We were ten years old, yeah?”

“Yes.” Ten years old and already she had seen too much. She doesn’t tell him about the murders, about the men she and Eren had already killed. It’s another thing they never talk about, another secret between them.

“Yeah, we were ten.” The house is quiet now, and Jean is warming to the subject. He jerks his head in the direction of the house, where lamps burn behind the broken windows, sending slivers of glowing red light dancing into the night. “And they were eleven. Twelve, for Reiner.”

“So?” Mikasa knows he’s right—it’s something she’s realized herself, during those long nights when she can’t sleep—but she’s never thought too hard on it, never allowed herself to get distracted by thoughts of mercy or pity. “They’re _monsters_ , Jean.”

“And the Military Police we killed probably thought we were monsters too.” He coughs and shivers, perhaps remembering having a gun pointed at his face, and the redemption that came for him from behind. “The men who took us, thinking we were Eren and Historia…” He shivers again, and for the first time, Mikasa feels the heat baking off him, realizes it isn’t coming from their sad little fire but from Jean himself as his body battles itself from within. “They were definitely monsters. If you all hadn’t shown up when you did…”

“I know monsters, Jean.” Mikasa scoots a little closer to him, close enough that their knees touch, and tosses the edge of her cloak over his shoulders. He looks up at her, surprised, shocked into silence by her proximity. He had touched her for the first time moments ago, and now she returns the favor, tugging her cloak around both of them so he can sweat out his fever. He needs better than a torn, filthy cloak, he needs a hospital and medicine and doctors, but it’s the best she can offer. “We’re not the monsters. _They_ are.”

Before he can answer, the night is split by another scream, and this time, there is no denying that it’s a name, a name that spirals up and up towards the early stars, the voice shouting it wet and ragged, hardly human anymore.

_”Bertolt Bertolt no no no no NO stop hurting him stop hurting him STOP STOP HE ISN’T DOING ANYTHING STOP HURTING HIM!”_

“They didn’t start screaming until Hange and the Captain figured it out,” Jean tells her, his voice almost conversational; if she wasn’t so close to him, Mikasa wouldn’t be able to hear him, not with how Reiner’s voice keeps rising and rising, keeps getting louder until it breaks apart into sobs, until it shatters like a piece of glass. It sounds like he can barely breathe. “But they figured it out, and they’re going to get their answers.” 

“How?” she asks, even though she already knows. 

“They didn’t scream until the other one was getting tortured.” Jean smiles at her, his teeth flashing white, the cracks between them stained with dried blood. “They’re using one against the other one.” 

Mikasa nods; it has a certain brilliance to it, a certain hideous elegance. She knows it would be the same for her, that she could withstand torture and pain for a long time but that as soon as she saw Eren being hurt, she would give in. She would have told the Military Police anything they wanted to know, if they’d been hurting Eren for the information, and it’s horrifying to know that there is such weakness inside her, to know that she could be used in such a way. 

Jean sighs, and he slumps to the side, leaning against her. Mikasa freezes, unused to such close contact from anyone except Eren—she wouldn’t have allowed even Armin to get this close, although that thought tears at her heart now, and she wishes, more than anything, that she could go back in time and let him cuddle up beside her, even once—but after a moment, she lifts her arm and lays it carefully across his shoulders. 

“Mikasa,” Jean says, rubbing his shoulder again, and when he takes his hand away, she’s shocked to see that it’s soaked with blood, “I think I’m dying.” 

“You’re not dying.” She starts to stand up, struggling to get him to his feet. “I’m not going to _let_ you die.” 

He laughs wetly at that, and spits something dark into the fire. “I don’t think you get to have a say in it.” 

“Come on, I’ll take you to the other house, you need to rest like Connie and Sasha.” He’s heavier than she thought he’d be, tangled in both their cloaks, and he doesn’t seem able to use his legs. 

“No!” He tries to tug her back down onto the stone, and dying or not, he still has some strength left in his arms. “I have to stay. I have to _listen_.” 

“Listen to _what_?” she demands, exasperated, but before Jean can answer, another scream tears through the air, silencing them both and making them freeze in their struggle. 

_”No NO stop stop PLEASE STOP he didn’t want to do it he was following orders HE WAS PROTECTING ME I’M THE ONE YOU WANT REINER REINER OH GOD STOP!”_

“I have to listen,” Jean tells her, and she can feel the warm mist of his blood on her face, “until I know who the monsters are.” 

“I don’t know,” Mikasa answers, and she can feel tears starting to well up in her eyes as they collapse together onto the stone, tears she brutally wipes away. “I don’t know, Jean, now let me help you so you don’t die.” 

He smiles at her, and even through the pain and the blood trickling out of his mouth, he looks more peaceful than she’s seen him in a long, long time. He raises one hand and touches the side of her head, where her hair hangs filthy and matted. “You’ve always had the most beautiful black hair.” 

She sits with him then, staring into the guttering embers of his fire, and listens to him breathe, listens to the screams and tries to decide who the monsters are. Once she figures that out, she tells herself, she can tell him and take him to the other house, where she can treat his wounds and get him resting, so he can survive. But with every scream, with every begging word asking the Captain and Hange to please, please spare the other one, to stop hurting the other one, she feels further and further from the answer. 

**Author's Note:**

> Wheeeeee! 
> 
> Here's a story for you: long, long ago, back when Homestucks roamed the Earth, I used to be pretty active on the LJ smut meme. I typically wrote pretty gloomy, depressing stuff, and that's what I became known for. One day, someone challenged me, calling me out specifically, to write something really, deliberately sad, claiming that they'd never cried while reading anything of mine even though a lot of other people said they had.
> 
> WELL. Far be it for me to let someone throw down the gauntlet like that and not respond! I sat my ass down and wrote [Goodnight, Nepeta](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/5870.html?thread=4402414), which was, as mentioned in my comment, the third time I made myself cry writing fic.
> 
> _Monsters_ is now the fourth time it's happened.


End file.
